


time and place

by astralis



Category: Room - Emma Donoghue
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 03:12:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8951716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralis/pseuds/astralis
Summary: Before she's Ma and baby is Jack she's just lost.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orangesandlemons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangesandlemons/gifts).



T - 9

She’s been lost the whole time she’s been here. She’s stuck in one tiny spot on Planet Earth and it’s like she’s buried down deep deep trapped underground, and Up There is sky and freedom and always out of reach.

She’s tried to reach it but there is no way out, round and round in circles is the only way to go and no map, no exit sign, no nothing, just her and the door that beeps and she can’t keep fighting an evil bigger than her. She's caught in this room and trapped in her own mind and there is nothing nothing nothing to save her but the slow spiral downwards to emptiness.

She’s tired. So so tired. She sleeps all day, doesn’t sleep at night, waits for time to crawl by her and end.

It doesn’t.

\- 8

When she was in the eighth grade one period of gym was given over to dire warnings about eating disorders. They’d been told, that class of teenage girls sitting there cross-legged on a wooden floor, pretending to be too cool to care in their light blue shirts and dark blue shorts, that anorexia could stop their periods. It was said with a tone of horror, oh-girls-imagine, but she’d thought of the tampons stashed into her backpack and waking up in the night, sheets damp and thighs red with blood, and wanted to laugh at the distance between herself and her teacher. She rolled her eyes at her friend instead because she didn’t want to be stood up in front of everyone and told off for rudeness and thought _I want my period to go away wish I could make it wish I could make it stop._

So now she’s all grown up, ha ha ha who would’ve thought, and sometimes there are months without periods and it’s just a thing that happens, a good thing because it means she’s not bleeding onto rags shoved into her panties and thinking she’s Laura Ingalls. The lack of food and the eighth grade gym class between them explain it and so she's not worried, not at all, doesn't think about it or any of this.

No thinking no thinking no thinking, if there’s one rule she has here that’s it.

\- 7

Before, when she was last year’s person, things happened mostly the same, her body changed mostly the same, so no thinking no thinking no thinking is no remembering no remembering no remembering no nothing, empty mind empty heart.

But.

She can’t do it.

She stands naked in the bathtub, water pooled around her ankles, and looks down at herself from a great height. She is a giant, her body someone else’s. She prods the tender breasts, puts her hand on the stretch marks that scarred the belly for nothing a year ago. 

She is not herself.

 _No,_ she thinks. _No no no no no no no._

She screams then, so that it fills her prison, seeps into every little corner, pushes against the roof and the outside walls as though it should be enough to bust her free _bang_.

Then she vomits into the toilet.

\- 6

The belly curves out and round, hard, filling slowly.

“Jesus,” he says, “you’re fucking knocked up again, aren’t you?”

She wants to laugh. Wants to say _who the fuck do you think did this to me?_. For a moment she almost does because carelessness is invincibility here, because _don’t care_ means _can’t hurt._

But there is more of her now and that’s how he can hurt and so something makes her say nothing, no words, even though there’s a part inside her that wants to spit the words out like rocks and make them real, make it his problem.

She closes her eyes, goes away in her head, tells herself that in the morning she’ll be real again.

\- 5

The world is solid today.

She lies on the rug under the skylight, her shirt pulled up under her breasts to let the sunshine fall on her belly. She’s feeling movement now, little swishes and turns and she can’t not know because it’s a part of her, inside of her and she’s done this before, has walked this road before and can’t turn off to go another way.

She puts her hand against the roundness, stares up up up into the distant sky. She wants a doctor, wants someone to rub gel on her belly and put the little scanner on it and point out her baby on a screen: _there’s your perfect baby_. Like TV, like books, where everything happens for a reason, makes the story work in the end. She tries to imagine a husband, a kind handsome man who holds her hand with tears in his eyes as he sees their baby for the first time, but there’s no husband and her imagination can’t make one out of hurt and so she switches scenes in her head, goes away to another world.

She’s a pioneer, living on the prairie, grass to her knees and sky for miles. No doctors, no nothing, Ma Ingalls, trying to remember: Mary and Laura were born in the Big Woods - but Carrie? Grace? Was Grace the older of the two, who knew, did it matter? And there had been a son, who died, who Laura didn’t mention in the books. It had come up in freshman English Lit, for some reason she didn’t now remember, and everyone had acted shocked, like it was totally new information. But she’d known, had read it in a biography of Laura a year earlier, and she’d been smug in her knowledge, in her lack of surprise, triumphant without knowing it might matter in some nightmare world, might mean something in that place where stories and life blurred together.

She’s Ma Ingalls now, pregnant with a baby that’ll live or die and there’s nothing she can do to control it and maybe if she can just think that way she’ll get through it.

(She wishes Pa was here to make sure she was locked in the attic and safe from strange men.)

She lies in the sunshine, eyes closed as night comes in, lets the world drift away again: the one thing she can do, lose herself in a place where she’s already lost.

\- 4

Today she’s Alice and Wonderland is terrifying.

Someone’s forced a bottle of Drink Me down her throat and her belly and breasts are all swelled up and she doesn’t have an Eat Me to make them go back to normal.

\- 3

The baby is hard up under her ribs like a rock and it’s the only thing that feels real when she wants to float away. She lies in bed, sore, too sore to bother getting up, too sore to care, and everything in the world is pain and nothingness and she’s not sure if that’s the same thing.

Baby is a rock in her ribs and it’s just like First Baby, the baby without a name and without a life. Reality slides, now to last year and back again and she can’t prove to herself that there was ever more than one baby because she can’t prove what’s real and what isn’t. She has everything, has nothing, is everything, is nothing.

The baby kicks hard _wham_ right up in the ribs, splits her in half, two places two times two babies all at once.

 _You came back_ she says, can’t even tell if she said it aloud. Doesn’t matter. She can scream and scream with no one to listen, so what do words matter?

She sleeps and is nothing again and blissful.

\- 2

Back aches head aches too big to move too big to do much of anything but it doesn’t matter, not to him.

He brings back the things he bought when First Baby was still inside her, faded onesies and used cloth diapers and a garish orange rattle, leaves it in a plastic bag on the table and she doesn’t look at it, just stashes it in the wardrobe like a secret she’s hiding from herself.

\- 1

Time stands still.

0

The pain starts slow, continues slow, here-and-there-and-maybe-everywhere, hurts to walk but she wants to, with nowhere to go, so she paces, and it gets worse, harder, faster, radiating out from her lower back and then water, rushing down her legs, someone’s pricked a pin in a balloon maybe.

Door beeps and in he comes, words rush out from deep inside her, _go away_ and he’s gone and it’s only the second time he’s gone away and the first was when Baby died.

She breathes again for a moment and then the pain is back, burning, thick between her legs.

She pushes.

Pushes.

Pushes.

Baby. Crying. Cracking time and the world into parts and gluing it back together again. Somewhere in her mind her mother says _honey you’re… not well_ but she’s too busy just being to hear it.

“You’re here,” she says, last year, to Baby, or this year, to Baby.

Baby is a boy now. Different, not different: still Baby and that’s all that matters, back again, back to her.

She picks him up, wiggly and wet and alive, puts him to her breast, breathes. Not quite sure how baby is, not quite sure how she is, but here. Here. Lost and found and lost again tomorrow, two of them together now and she the one who's supposed to take care of things.

Everything still hurts.

\+ 1

Baby’s on the floor while she washes her plate. She knows not to leave Baby unsupervised on the bed; he might roll over, might smother himself, might turn quiet and cold like before. She’s pretty sure that Baby can’t roll over but it’s best to be safe, so she puts him on a towel in the sunlight. Can’t leave him there too long though or he might get burned, it's winter and the light is tissue thin but you can't be too safe and so she turns - 

and there he is, lips curving upward maybe a smile, flexing tiny fingers - 

and she falls _splat_ in love.

She sits down heavy heavy on the rug beside him, picks him up, looks down into dark alive eyes. “Hi Jack,” she says, hears her voice, out loud now, filling the room, their room, their lives. “I’m your Ma.”


End file.
